


There Is More Than This

by Shameless_Weeb_Lacking_A_Filter



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Child Neglect, Drabble, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Obscurial!Harry, Obscurus (Harry Potter), Pre-Hogwarts, Recently Edited, What-If, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 07:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9167764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shameless_Weeb_Lacking_A_Filter/pseuds/Shameless_Weeb_Lacking_A_Filter
Summary: Harry is a Freak, first and foremost, and what he can do... Scares him.So he stops.(When a child represses their magic, that child becomes the host to an obscurus, an entity based on fear, death, and destruction.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [camdennnn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/camdennnn/gifts).



...

 

 

Freak’s real name is not Freak, even though that's all he is called.

It’s Harry James Potter, and he was born on a Thursday on July 31, 1980, to a mother and a father whose names he doesn’t know and probably never will know. He is nine years old in exactly six months and three days, not that anyone will celebrate his birthday when it comes.

His schoolteachers always call him “Mister Potter” and peer down at him past their thick-rimmed spectacles, their mouths hard lines pinched in disapproval. Sometimes he almost wishes they would call him “Mister Dursley”, just so he wouldn’t be so alone, so held separate even from his relatives. 

Once, when he was in Year One of primary school, the teacher, a heavyset lady with a pretty face and bleach-blond hair, asked them all to draw a family portrait.

Harry sat quietly in his chair for the whole hour, hands folded neatly in his lap, paper blank in front of him. Nobody asked what he was doing or if he ever planned to start working.

Everyone just left him be, walking deliberately past his chair and engaging the other children in conversation. Like he was forgettable. Dudley threw a tantrum from his chair across the room, sobbing great fake sobs and whining that he didn't want to put Freak in his portrait.

Harry continued sitting still, back rigidly straight, making no noise and pretending he didn't exist.

But that was four whole entire years ago, and things have changed since then. Now if asked to draw his family he would gladly cover the whole thing in pictures of his aunt and uncle, with hearts doodled in the margin, even.

He knows the Dursleys are not-nice bad people, but no one else seems to think so, and they are so comfortingly _normal_. Not like Harry.

He only wants to not feel so isolated, in his own little bubble of weird and bad and _freak_. If he was a Dursley, he would have a family. He would have friends, maybe. Even Dudley _(especially Dudley)_ has friends, and Piers Polkiss might be insufferable, but he’s still another human being.

It isn’t so hard these days for Harry to doubt that he himself is one of those. Human.

“Mister Potter,” a voice sings-- the female teacher for the third year students. Her tone is a mocking lilt that reminds Harry of a cat, pleased to have caught its prey. Pleased to have caught the Freak off-task, doing something he's not meant to.

The boy looks up from his piece of paper (it's torn from a secondhand composition book, the one Dudley used last year, in fact), green eyes wide and trying to seem as innocent as possible.

The teacher’s face does that funny thing that adults’ faces do when they’re angry, but by now they're just so tired of reprimanding you that they're reduced to weary sighing and disappointment.

“Pay attention in my class, Mister Potter,” she says finally, and walks back down the aisles of desks, heels clicking harshly on the tiled floor.

He can hear the other children whispering and tittering amongst themselves at his expense, like they always do when he screws up. He’s numb to it now, mostly, so he picks up his stubby little pencil before pressing it down into the paper so hard that the tip of it snaps.

It’s okay, he thinks, even though it makes him a little bit sad and frustrated all at once. He’d drawn enough today, anyway.

The page of notebook paper is covered in angry little scribbles, tight blobs of graphite smeared across it in sporadic clusters.

They are nothing, they mean nothing.

The Freak doesn’t mean anything, either, and it’s probably a sign of how truly strange he is, that he finds himself relating to pencil drawings.

 

The rest of the school day passes in a blur of boredom and clock-watching, with Harry and his Freakiness both quiet and unassuming. He’s not done anything _like that_ in a very long time, has kept all the fury and the injustice and the Bad tucked away deep inside himself.

He is still punished for it, though, because when the Dursleys are afraid of something it is easiest to blame Harry for its occurrence and then beat the abnormality out of him like if they hit him hard enough the weird will leak out his bones, never to be seen again.

_“Dudders’ favourite colouring book went missing today, Petunia.”_

_“You don’t suppose--?”_

_“Like there’s another explanation.”_

Some days it is harder than others.

_“My sister Marge is coming over tomorrow, Boy. Don’t do anything,” he shudders, pudgy face vaguely purple. “Freakish.”_

A funny sort of sickness came over him that day, when Marge kept saying horrid things about the parents he’d never met and he’d had to force a smile and pretend that he didn’t want to rip her fat frame apart by the seams.

As promised, he hadn’t done anything wrong, had kept silent for the good of them all, and pushed down the ugly Something that tried to rear its head in the depths of his gut and shoot out the tips of his fingers.

For once he had been good.

But all the Dursleys had done was regard him with wary relief and go on their separate ways like he’d not done anything at all (which, he supposes, he hadn’t).

It still hurts sometimes.

Hurts enough to want to hurt someone else in return, make them _feel_ and ache and _suffer_.

Harry tries his best to keep the hurting inside and nowhere else. He is a danger to himself and others. He is Nothing, and the only Something that he could possibly be is Wrong.

_After a while you start to get sick of yourself and the insults don't roll off your back like they used to. The word 'brat' becomes more familiar to you than your own name and you long for the days when they still treated you like a baby instead of a burden. You learn that what you mean to other people isn't the same as what they mean to you, and you learn that you can hate someone with all your being and love them just the same._

 

One day wishing away the Bad stops working.

It pools hot and promising in his stomach, sparking and hissing like wildfire. It thrums through his veins, coiling around his chest and resting, thick and heavy, in his heart. It is a black viper worming its way into his brain and whispering to _do it you know you’ll feel better if you just relax do it do it do it._

It seems like the kind of thing that ought to make him feel alive, but just makes him wish he were dead.

He is so very tired, and so sick of everything.

The reasonable thing would be to tell somebody. To get help.

But Harry is just a sad, strange little boy who no one really cares about and no one really wants.

_Your parents took one look at you and offed themselves, ‘cause they couldn’t bear the thought of raising something that would turn out so utterly worthless._

He has no one to get help from.

 

 

_He gives in to the whispers._

 

 

He's crying, now. Always crying. Over nothing and everything-- nothing makes sense anymore and he _hates it hates it hates it._

Something's breaking, something made of glass. The clatter it makes is harsh and jarring. He isn't sure of whether or not he likes that noise. It appeals to him on some baser level, makes the beast in his stomach purr in satisfaction.

It turns out to be a mirror that's broken. His uncle shoves him onto his hands and knees and makes him pick up the pieces.

Glass pricks his fingers, blood streaming and slicking his hand. His aunt tells him to be more careful.

He nods, grateful, a small smile easing across his face, when she clarifies by saying that she won't have his blood dirtying her freshly-mopped floor.

His small fist clenches.

His body goes up in smoke and his relatives scream.

  

 

His body doesn’t know how to exist any longer. He is fury and justice and _he is Bad_. He is ash-colored smoke that somehow has the strength to crush buildings and tear picture-perfect houses up by the roots and rip them apart brick by brick.

He, for once, is not an observer.

He takes things for his own.

He breaks it all apart and rebuilds it on a whim.

He’s completely mercury-brimmed mad and doesn’t even care.  _That's a **lie** , he always cares; words _**_hurt_** _, they ache and tear and bruise like fists._

He is for once himself and no one can tell him to stop.

 

Well.

Maybe not _himself._

More like rage personified, concentrated down into such a powerful force that it’s terrifying.

He is everything he’s never wanted to be but the freedom almost makes it worth it.

 

 

 

 

In the end, it isn’t.

Worth it, that is.

 

It isn’t.  
...


End file.
